


Five Things Simmons Talked Fitz Into (And One They Agreed On)

by krakens



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakens/pseuds/krakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Come on, Fitz. It’ll be fun,” Simmons says for the (honest to god) hundred and ninth time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Graduation Party

“Come on, Fitz. It’ll be fun,” Simmons says for the (honest to god) hundred and ninth time.

“You think a lot of things are fun that aren’t actually,” he says. “Dissecting things, for instance.”

“Oh, like your weird little robots are so much cooler.”

“Hey,” he complains. She looks over her shoulder at him before returning to the meticulous and dangerous-looking task of applying her eyeliner. He’s not a hundred percent sure why she’s doing her make up in his room, because as he reminds her daily she has her own room. But she ends up here a lot of the time, regardless.

“All I’m saying is that we’re only going to graduate once, so we might as well go to the party. Plus, it’s worth celebrating! We’ll be real SHIELD agents next week.”

“I don’t like parties,” he says. She scoffs. “And I don’t like anyone in our graduating class. Neither do you, by the way.”

“Oh, I like them just fine,” she says. “And so do you. You’re just being grumpy.”

“Really?” he asks. She nods. “Name one person in our class you like.”

She sets down her eyeliner and glances up at the ceiling, drawing her fingers to her chin in a prolonged gesture of cartoonishly exaggerated thought.

“Besides me,” he says after a moment.

“Right, _you_ ,” she ribs, tossing her hands up. “I knew I was forgetting somebody.”

“Funny. Hilarious.”

“It’ll be fun,” she says again. “Come on, you don’t even have to stay the whole time. If you really hate it you can come right back here.”

“You could go without me, you know.”

“I don’t want to do that,” she says, and it would be almost convincing if she weren’t still primping despite the fact that he’s said a hundred and ten times that he doesn’t want to go. “Come on, Fitz. Come for ten minutes. I won’t even make you get dressed up fancy.” He considers it for a second if only to get her to stop talking about it.

“No,” he says. “No, because if I go with you, I’ll end up being there the whole time and you know it.”

“See? You just admitted you’d end up having fun if you went,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“I would not.”

“Then come with me and prove me wrong,” she says, grinning in an already self-congratulatory fashion.

Fitz ends up going to the party because Simmons could probably talk him into anything. As it turns out, SHIELD parties are pretty much nothing like college parties, and in lieu of dance music and drinking there are improperly requisitioned fireworks and narrowly avoiding arrest.

They might avoid the police, but their supervising officer catches them and Fitz spends the night caged up in a crowded holding cell with twenty-four people he’s never been very fond of and one that makes it almost tolerable. 


	2. Disaster Relief

The news stations are still doing 24-hour disaster coverage when Simmons first broaches the topic.

“That’ll take a while to clean up, huh?” she says, heaving a lengthy sigh as she leans on the back of his chair. They’re in the Sci-Ops refectory, which is jam packed full of evacuees from the Project PEGASUS campus. He looks up from his bowl of fruit loops to the image on the television screen, which shows a giant defunct alien warship strewn across the roofs of several Manhattan high-rises.

“Yeah,” Fitz agrees, turning his attention back to his breakfast. “Glad it’s not my job.”

“It’s kind of amazing, though, isn’t it?” She sits down next to him at the table. He looks up and around quickly to make sure her comment didn’t attract too much attention.

“Did you maybe mean awful and say the wrong word?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah, it’s awful,” she says. “It’s really just absolutely awful,” she adds in a louder aside, and if she hadn’t drawn attention before she definitely has now. Fitz feels his cheeks burn under the unwanted attention-by-proxy. “But, also…” she starts again, her voice lower.

“Amazing?”

“ _Amazing_. Aliens, Fitz. Real living alien creatures,” she gushes. Thankfully she keeps the volume down.

“They’re quite dead now,” he points out, stirring his cereal absently.

“That doesn’t matter,” Simmons says, leaning forward in her seat. She can’t seem to prize her eyes away from the television screen. “It’s an unprecedented discovery. I’ve always hoped I’d be alive to see it. An alien species – intelligent, organized… _biomechnical_ ,” she points out. And even though he has to admit that’s pretty nifty, he doesn’t want to get involved in this.

“Ruthless, evil,” he adds.

“Oh, that’s a little dramatic. They couldn’t have had much say in the matter, you can hardly blame them for it,” she says. He can’t quite believe what he’s hearing, although given Simmons’ irreverent obsession with everything otherworldly since they caught wind of the New Mexico incident, he shouldn’t be surprised.

Still, she’s honestly trying to justify the alien army’s _motivation_ in attacking. “Are you honestly—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, because it doesn’t really matter. “Whatever,” he mumbles.

“What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on one of those guys,” she says, chin propped on hand, still staring at the television with childlike rapture. The display has switched to grainy looping footage of a Chitauri footsoldier screeching a hair-splitting battle cry before crushing a taxi cab like an empty beer can. Fitz’s nose crinkles in distaste.

“Well, that’s a little above our pay grade,” he says. He’s actually glad about that, because it means apart from the couple hundred extra people in the facility, he can continue his day-to-day life as if nothing’s actually happened on the other side of the country. New York might have aliens to deal with, but he’s here, and that means a quiet day of hopefully working on the dwarves.

“Yeah,” she sighs, humming sadly for a second. “Although…”

“Oh, no,” he says, hoping to interrupt her before she go on.

“They’re taking volunteers to transfer over there, so we could—”

“No. No. No.”

“—just go for a couple weeks, until everything’s sorted out—”

“I’m not listening,” he insists.

“—because they’re really hurting badly for extra hands, and they’ll take pretty much anyone who’s not on active assignment. We’re _overqualified_ , honestly.”

“I don’t want to go to New York,” he says. “You know how I feel about flying right after national disasters.”

“Do you want to know the best part?” she asks, turning her attention away from the television and back to him.

“I really don’t.”

“We’d get moved up a clearance level if we were accepted. It’s a great opportunity for career advancement.”

“I don’t want to advance in my career,” he says. “I want to finish calibrating Grumpy’s olfactory sensors, which, by the way, I need _your_ help doing, so you can’t go either.”

“Bring him,” she suggests, her lower lip protruding in the beginnings of a pout. He looks away. “We can work on it in our downtime. Come on. A change of scenery might be good for you, you know.”

He grumbles a few non-words in response.

“Please, Fitz,” she says. “I can’t go by myself. Can you imagine if we were different clearance levels? It’d be a nightmare, logistically. Just come for three weeks and then we’ll come right back here.”

He looks at her again. She’s not pouting but she is wearing this tentative, hopeful grin. “Two weeks,” he says.

“Deal,” she says.

Of course, by the time they get to New York, the streets have long been scrubbed clean of any Chitauri blood and all that’s left to be done is bureaucracy and gruntwork. They end up assigned to a secure facility in the Bronx, sorting through piles of dust and rubble and extracting and isolating the occasional shard of non-terrestrial material. Simmons never sees so much as a Chitauri pinky toe, let alone anything actually interesting.

Fitz can tell she’s disappointed, even if she tries not to let it show. He tries not to give her a hard time when they end up being there for almost three months instead of the three weeks she’d originally promised.


End file.
